Is your salmon shirt gay?

My boyfriend asked me if I’d heard of the color term ‘salmon’ being applied to women’s clothing, and I replied that the term was invented strictly for men’s clothing for these situations:

Guy 1: Hey, bro, why you wearing a pink shirt?

Guy 2: Nah, dude, this is salmon. Not gay

He then proceeded to tell me that two guys at his work had almost the same conversation except for the gay part, but it’s pretty much implied. It’s been ingrained in our heads that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, so much so that some guys have gay-panic at the thought of being accused of being one simply for wearing a pink shirt. And some people thought it was stupid Target was no longer separating their toys by gender. That stuff stays with you and it is not so simple as letting boys be boys and so forth. The sexes will always be different, but each individual should have the choice to choose how they portray themselves. The same goes for race. Each race has their own cultural differences and we need to stop spouting the mantra of ‘we are all the same,’ because that doesn’t celebrate diversity and assumes someone had the same experiences as you. However, that doesn’t mean every individual of that race encompasses those cultural differences, for they still can choose how to portray themselves.

And then there’s the gay part. To be called gay is to be called weak, inferior, and different. And in this society, to be different is unnatural and so some of us shun that term. Society has always shunned the different because different means anarchy and the unknown. To be different means society has to conform to you, so what does society do when they fear you and the unknown? They make you conform to them. It is an innate fear, but to recognize this fear is to recognize we can rise above it. Sometimes, you don’t have to change the world, you only have to acknowledge the cultural, gender, and sexual-orientation differences that exist and know they apply to a group, but not individuals.